Religion was an integral part of the Winter household. Edwina read the Bible to Johnny and Edgar every afternoon when they got home from school, and the family attended church services every Sunday. Beaumont was predominantly Baptist, and Edwina attended services at the Calder Baptist Church. John Jr. was Episcopalian and attended services at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Johnny attended both churches when he was young, but when he was older, he was allowed to choose the church he wanted to attend. Johnny chose St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, where his father, a high tenor, sang in the church choir. Johnny also joined the choir at St. Mark’s, but his time in that ensemble was short-lived.
“Everybody else was so bad it pissed me off,” he says. “Nobody else could sing. I sang real loud and they called me out for singing too loud. I said, ‘Nobody else is singing loud enough so you can hear it.’ That pissed me off, and I finally quit.”
Despite his hostility toward the choir, Johnny still attended church every Sunday until he was nineteen years old. “I think it helped us, that we got something out of it,” he says. “I believe in God. I’ve always believed there’s something out there, something bigger than just people.”
Johnny grew up with a small extended family. George Holland Jr., his mother’s brother, never married, and his father’s two sisters, Roberta Winter and Mary Castleman, lived out of state, as did his fraternal grandmother, also named Roberta Winter. His childhood influences came from his mother’s side of the family, particularly his great-grandfather George Holland Sr., who doted on him from the minute he was born.
“My grandfather was just wild about Johnny,” remembered Edwina. “He loved him dearly. He always carried him around and talked to him.”
“Ole Pa was in his nineties,” says Johnny. “He didn’t have a musical background but he tried to help me get into music. When my rabbit died, he bought me a ukulele to make me feel better. He bought me my first guitar, and started giving me money to learn particular songs. He really was a big force in me learning to play different kinds of music. I named my corporation after him—Ole Pa Enterprises. He was my businessman hero.”
His grandfather Edgar Holland, who he called “Bompa,” played bluegrass music on the violin. He played “Turkey in the Straw” and other bluegrass classics for Johnny and Edgar when they visited.
Although he never met John Dawson Winter Sr., his namesake and grandfather on his father’s side, he has fond memories of his fraternal grandmother. “Daddy’s mother was sweet, and real prim and proper,” Johnny says. “She was born in Berryville, Virginia. We went down there for vacation—it was a long way from Beaumont— a three-day drive. We saw her in the summer and I got to know her pretty well. She was a sweet old woman.”
John Jr.’s older sister, Roberta Winter, was a drama instructor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. The college named a theater after her, but Johnny wasn’t a fan.
“She was an old school marm—I think she was an old dyke really,” says Johnny. “She didn’t have any kids. I remember not likin’ her at all; she tried to control us and that really made me mad. She threw a glass of water on me when I was just a little kid. I told her God didn’t let her have kids because she didn’t have sense enough to have any—to treat them like that. Instead of pickin’ the glass up, I was slidin’ it across the table. She threw it at me and she didn’t have any business doin’ that. It was in my parents’ house, but they stayed out of it. That made me mad at them too. They should have said something to her.”
Johnny had another aunt and three cousins in Kingsport, Tennessee. He didn’t see them often, but when he spent time with them during a family vacation, his older cousin Tommy made a lasting impression.
“Daddy’s younger sister, Mary Castleman, was real sweet,” he says. “Aunt Mary had three children. I saw them for a month one summer when Aunt Roberta rented a beach house in Florida. There was one kid named Tommy who played the trombone. He was about twelve when he played it for us. I couldn’t believe it. I loved it.”
With the magic of Tommy’s trombone still vivid in his memory, Johnny was captivated by Pete Kelly’s Blues, a film he saw with his parents while vacationing in San Antonio. Released in 1955, Pete Kelly’s Blues was a musical action drama about jazz musicians who have violent run-ins with mobsters while playing a speakeasy during prohibition. Set in Kansas City in 1927, the film starred Jack Webb as a cornet player in a struggling jazz band, and featured musical performances by Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. That film proved to be a turning point in Johnny’s life.
“I remember that movie making me want to be a musician,” Johnny says. “It was real bluesy music with songs I could relate to, a lot of the songs I had grown up singing. I didn’t like Pete Kelly’s part so much; the shootin’ part of the movie didn’t appeal to me. It was the music that got me. I didn’t feel like I had a way to express myself, but after seein’ that movie, I knew I could do it through my music.”
Johnny’s belief in himself and in his ability to do whatever he wanted to do was stronger than any liability fate had sent his way. Fearless as a child (a trait he never lost), Johnny never let his limited eyesight deter him from using a bicycle to explore his neighborhood, ride to school, and visit his grandparents, who lived about a ten-minute car trip from his home.
Johnny always had red bikes, but his favorite was “a real fancy red bike with chrome fenders.” That bike could have cost him his life; instead it opened his eyes to an adult world of wives, girlfriends, and payoffs.
“My bike was in my friend’s front yard and a guy who was drunk ran over it,” he recalls. “The guy went up the front lawn, right over my bicycle, and up the front steps of the house. We went to the movies; if we’d been playin’ in the yard, we would have been run over. That’s why he paid me a good bit of money for wrecking my bike. The guy had a girlfriend in the car with him and it wasn’t his wife. So he was willing to pay anything because he didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Johnny grew up in a big house on 275 West Caldwood Drive with a spacious yard, a double swing on the porch, and swings in the backyard. He remembers climbing high up a mulberry tree to play in a tree house his father built. During their early years, he and Edgar shared a small bedroom, where they slept in yellow bunk beds.
“I picked it so I was on the top bunk,” says Johnny. “Edgar and I got along real fine. We’re different and we had that in common. As kids, we played mostly music and cowboys. I was the good guy. At the movies, we’d see cowboy and Indian movies. Roy Rogers was my favorite. We played cowboys, space people, and pirates. Anything we wanted to be, we’d dress up like it. We’d put on cowboy hats one day, pirate outfits another day, and spacemen outfits another day.”
Because of Johnny’s fascination with space travel, his grandfather built him a spaceship. Constructed of plywood and shaped like a pyramid, the spaceship had portholes in the sides and radio equipment Johnny and Edgar used as a control board.
Their father bought a small standalone store that had gone out of business and moved it into the backyard as a playhouse. When Johnny was about ten or twelve, he formed a club called the Texas Golden Eagles; the playhouse became their clubhouse. As leader and president of the club, he made up “weird initiations” for new members and banned girls from joining.
As the oldest and more dominant brother, Johnny ruled the roost. He picked the games they would play and made the rules. He always won at Monopoly and other board games; chess was the only game where Edgar could beat his older brother.
Due to the lack of pigmentation characteristic of being albino, Johnny was told to cover up and stay out of the sun. But he never heeded that advice.
“There were a lot of beaches in Beaumont,” he says. “Although I wasn’t supposed to, I played outside in the sun anyway and went to the beach all the time. I’d get real red, real burned. I didn’t blister though—just burned. We fished a little bit too. Me and Daddy fished off the pier in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Another pastime Johnn
y shared with his father was learning how to shoot a gun, a rite of passage in Texas. Johnny remembers his grandfather and great-grandfather always keeping a gun handy, both in the house and in the glove compartment of their cars.
“Learning how to shoot a gun was the normal thing to do—people carry guns there a lot,” says Johnny. “I was twelve when Daddy taught me how to shoot. I always had guns—shotguns and pistols too. We had a farm where we’d shoot beer cans in the water. We had a manmade lake and we’d throw them in and shoot at them.” It would be another seven years before Johnny realized how dangerous carrying a gun could be.
During the summers of 1955 and 1956, Johnny spent five weeks each summer at Camp Rio Vista in Texas Hill Country near the Guadalupe River.
“It was a long time to be away from home,” he says. “The first year I went by myself; I got homesick but ended up having a pretty good time. The second year Edgar went to the same camp with me, but was in a different age group. We played, went swimming, rode horses; they had all different games you could play.”
Johnny’s close friends, family, band members, and crew are well aware of his proclivity to go au naturel, but his tendency to sleep in the nude didn’t go over well with the counselors at Camp Rio Vista.
“I don’t usually wear a lot of clothes around the house,” he explains. “When I was in school, in my mother’s house in the winter, I’d do my homework without my clothes on. I’d keep the heater on in the bathroom to keep the room warm. When I was goin’ to summer camp, they made me run around the whole track naked because I did the Pledge of Allegiance without any clothes on. I was late wakin’ up and just ran out. They said their way of curing me was to make me run around the track. But that was fine with me. I’m more comfortable that way—) just don’t like to wear clothes.”
Johnny loved to swim. He had taken private lessons and lessons at the YMCA, so he enrolled in advanced swimming classes at summer camp.
“I started takin’ lessons when I was a kid; I was seven or eight years old. I’m a pretty good swimmer—I used to swim for hours.”
Summer camp gave Johnny the recognition and acceptance he craved. During his second year, he won two awards; one for musical talent and the other for popularity. The latter award touched his heart.
“I won one for singing two Homer and Jethro tunes. They were a country and western comedy team. I did ‘Two Tone Shoes,’ makin’ fun of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Heartbreak Motel’ instead of ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ I also won the Golden Arrows Award for getting along with everybody else, and being one of the most liked people. It was great because I wasn’t liked in school at all.
“I was one of the most popular people at summer camp, but back in school I was a total reject. I couldn’t play football or baseball. There wasn’t anything I could do to be one of the gang. But in summer camp, I was one of the gang. I was liked a lot ’cause I could do things. They had archery, high jumps, broad jumps, the one-hundred-yard dash, boxing, canoeing, bowling—things I could do as well as anybody. I enjoyed summer camp a whole lot.”
Although Johnny’s limited eyesight affected his ability to play sports at school and made him feel like an outcast, he didn’t let that discourage him.
“I made up my mind at a real early age, that things were gonna be real hard for me and I was gonna have to fight for anything I wanted to get,” Johnny says. “Edgar was always more willing to sit back and observe what was goin’ on. I wanted to jump right in the middle and feel what was goin’ on.”
Johnny broadened his social outlets by joining the Cub Scouts and the Boys Scouts, where he earned badges, went on camping trips, and achieved the rank of second-class scout.
“I never did get to be Eagle Scout,” he says with a laugh. “You had to learn Morse code, and I just couldn’t learn Morse code to save my life. That was the one thing that kept me from getting to be a first-class scout. What I remember most about the camping trips is being cold. Freezing my butt off. It was cold in the middle of March in Texas. We had campfires at every campsite and they put me in charge of keeping all the fires goin’ for about two hours at a time. I could not keep all the fires going at once and I got whipped for that. I didn’t think I did too badly, but I got whipped anyway. They hit ya in the butt.”
When the South Texas State Fair came to Beaumont every October, Johnny and his friends breezed through the livestock and poultry exhibits and spent the day and their allowances on the carnival midway, eating candy apples and cotton candy, and going on all the rides. But even then, he was smart enough not to waste his money on carnival games that were rigged. His albinism had taught him the ways of the world at an early age, but it also gave him compassion for other people who didn’t quite fit into society.
“I used to go to the freak shows with my friends,” he says. “You’d go in a tent and they’d have gorilla man—a guy who had hair all over his body—tattooed men and women too, bearded lady, midgets. I felt sorry for them because I could relate to the people who were in there. I could do more where I wouldn’t end up in a sideshow, but I definitely felt sorry for the people who had to go through that.”
Johnny’s early memories include listening to a wooden console radio with his family in the evening. He loved “scary radio shows,” especially Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Shadow. Those shows made such an impression on him, he still occasionally listens to vinyl recordings of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Shadow, and Lights Out, a mid-1930s radio show billed as the “ultimate in horror.”
Television was still in its infancy in the late 1940s, a luxury only the wealthy could afford. Johnny’s grandparents bought an RCA Victor set before the Winters had a TV, so Johnny and his family watched the early television shows at their house. Johnny woke up early on Saturday mornings to go to his grandparents’ house and watch children’s shows. He didn’t like cartoons, but never missed Space Patrol, a half-hour space show that debuted in 1950. He loved the adventures of the show’s hero and still imitates the announcer’s voice when he says, “Buzz Corry—commander in chief of the Space Patrol.”
When Johnny’s family finally bought a Philco television, he watched The Howdy Doody Show, Roy Rogers, and a local children’s show called Uncle Willie’s. Johnny appeared on Uncle Willie’s, which began as a radio show and moved to TV.
“I was on Uncle Willie’s on radio and TV,” says Johnny. “I was just a little kid when I first went on. Uncle Willie read books and played little kids’ records. The kids sat on a bench and we’d say our names. I’d say, ‘I’m Johnny Winter and I want to say hello to my mother and my daddy and my grandparents.’”
Johnny’s grandparents never missed The Ed Sullivan Show, so his family watched it with them on Sunday nights. Johnny wasn’t impressed with the smorgasbord of jugglers, acrobats, animal acts, singers, comedians, puppeteers, ventriloquists, and plate spinners, but enjoyed Elvis Presley’s debut appearance on September 9, 1956.
Elvis Presley was the white man with the black sound and feel that Sun Records owner Sam Philips had been searching for, so it isn’t surprising that four of Presley’s five Sun Record singles were remakes of songs written and/or recorded by black blues artists. It was the blues feel of Elvis’s records that appealed to Johnny.
Johnny was developing his taste for the blues, but had only heard homogenized versions deemed suitable for white audiences. Ironically, it was the upper-middle-class status of his parents and grandparents that introduced him to the real deal. Both families had black servants working in their homes, which would prove to be fortuitous in several ways. It made Johnny “colorblind” when it came to people and kept him from embracing the prejudice that was a way of life in Beaumont. It also exposed him to the music that would turn his life around.
“Servants were treated well, but nobody treated them normally—you wouldn’t treat them like a friend,” Johnny says. “You’d be nice to them and that was it. Sadie was my mother’s maid. We called her Sainty—she was real sweet. She lived in the black side of
town and came in twice a week. She ironed clothes, cleaned the house, did laundry. I treated Sadie like a real friend. I still have a picture of her daughter in high school. I stayed friendly with Sadie.”
Johnny also befriended his great-grandfather’s servants, who introduced him to raw earthy sounds of blues by black artists.
“Ole Pa had a guy named Ameal Martin who was Creole, a black Frenchman from Louisiana.” Johnny says. “We called him Meal. He cleaned the yard, cut the grass, did chores around the house. Lilly, a black woman in her forties, was the maid. Lilly had the radio on all the time. She listened to KJET in the kitchen—the only black station in Beaumont. I was about ten or eleven and that was the first time I heard blues. It was real raw—completely different from the music my parents and grandparents listened to. I started listenin’ to blues on KJET because I liked what I heard in the kitchen.”
2
MUSICAL FROM BIRTH
Growing up in a family of musicians had a strong influence on both Johnny and Edgar.
“The boys were both musical from the time they were born,” said Edwina. “Part of it was because they were legally blind and their acute hearing made up in part for their lack of sight. Music was always a part of their lives. When they were little, I would play with them and for them, and their Daddy would, too. When they were little tiny fellas, they could harmonize. They had a natural ear for music.”
“I always wanted to be a musician from the time I was old enough to start singing, when I was three or four years old,” says Johnny. “I liked performing—everybody got off on me and I liked to do it. Edgar and me learned to sing as soon as we could talk because Daddy was always involved in music. When I was just a little kid—maybe five or six, Momma would play piano in our living room and we started singing three-part harmonies with Daddy. Our first songs were ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird,’ ‘Ain’t She Sweet,’ and ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’—songs Daddy sang in the barbershop quartet. It was really nice.”
Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) Page 3
